Rendering DVD from HD Video

RBereit wrote on 10/13/2009, 11:25 AM

I've been using Vegas for more than six years now. Have created numerous DVD's from DV Tape. Recently, I moved to HD and have successfully used Vegas to create great Blu-Ray disks.

The problem is that I now have some HD (1920 X1080) video that I need to share with some friends who haven't yet moved on to HD. Consequently, I want to render the video in SD format to burn onto a DVD.

I've followed Sony's suggestions and rendered the video using the MPEG-2 Encoder (with separate rendering session to handle AC3 audio). When I bring the resulting .mpg file in DVD Architect, the results are less than spaticular. Getting lots of image breakup, especially along the edges of vertical images and when there is motion present. Looks like a bad horizontal hold on older TV's.

And to be sure this wasn't just a DVD Architect anomoly, I burned a DVD out of Architect, but the results are just as bad.

Is there any rendering/preparing combination I can use to get better results when down converting from HD to SD?

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 10/13/2009, 12:57 PM

To render HD video to SD widescreen for DVD:

1. Render the audio to AC3. Do NOT use the presets, but instead set a custom preset (one that you should use with ALL stereo audio). Change both Line Profile and RF Mode (the Preprocessing tab in the Custom dialog) to None. Set dialog normalization to -31dB.

2. Add the Sharpen fX to the output bus and set the sharpen value to "0".

3. Render the MPEG-2 using the "DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream" preset. NEVER, ever use the Default MPEG-2 preset for anything. Sony stupidly set this preset to use an intermediate rather than maximum "Video Quality" setting. I can't imagine how many thousands of hours of DVD video has been ruined by this stupid, misguided decision. Maybe they have finally changed it in the latest release of Vegas.

4. Click on the Custom setting for MPEG-2 and on the Project tab, set the Video Rendering Quality to Best.

5. This last step is not needed, but I always change the Field Order to match my source material. In this case that means set it to Interlaced, Top Field First. This gives Vegas one less thing to do, and DVD players are just as happy to play top or bottom field first.

Do NOT render using progressive.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 10/13/2009, 12:59 PM

This was discussed at length about a year or so ago. Try doing a search. I'm confident you'll more information than you care to know on the subject.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 10/13/2009, 1:01 PM

"Do NOT render using progressive."

John, why is that? All of our stuff in rendered progressive and it looks beautiful.